President Obama gave a speech on the economy last week saying that
while it was still getting worse, the rate at which is was
deteriorating was decreasing. Those of us who have had calculus
would sat that while state of the economy still has a negative
derivative, at least it has a positive second derivative. He might
have said that, but these days people in the financial industry are
a little leery of the word "derivative". [-mrl]

In a recent MT VOID I mentioned the science documentaries I see on
the History Channel. Without sacrificing science content they try
to provide material visually and even flamboyantly so that it
appeals to younger viewers. While some older viewers might find
this patronizing, if it gets young people interested in science, it
is all to the good. I like their science programming even though
that station is not the first place one would expect to find
science programming. Sure, much of their programming has nothing
to do with history, per se, but their programming is usually
entertaining and informative nonetheless. Their series "Universe"
is one of the better sources for astronomical and cosmological
education.

I recently got an advance copy of their "The History Channel
Prehistoric Collection", a selection of documentaries that have
played or will play on their cable channel. The set contains eight
DVDs with 12 hour-long episodes of "Prehistoric Fight Club", seven
hour-long episodes of the series "Prehistoric Mega-Disasters", then
two more documentaries: "Clash of the Cave Men" and "Journey to
10,000 BC". The package will get its general release on May 26,
2009.

"Jurassic Fight Club":
One of the best remembered "Twilight Zone" episodes is the
adaptation of Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life." Billy Mumy plays
a boy about ten years old who has God-like powers but absolutely no
sense of responsibility. Among his powers is to will the
television to show any kind of programming his young mind wants.
What does he choose to create? He makes movies of dinosaurs
fighting. But I can understand that. It may not be the most
elevated form of entertainment, but something about it appeals to
the kid in me. I liked watching dinosaurs battle going all the way
back to the 1956 documentary THE ANIMAL WORLD which featured
animimation by special effects giants Willis O'Brien and Ray
Harryhausen. I think a lot people probably feel the same way,
openly or not. Seeing prehistoric behemoths fight stokes my
imagination, and always has. That taste is part of the appeal of
their series "Jurassic Fight Club".

When I got the package I had not yet seen any episodes of this
series, mostly finding the sensationalist title to be a bit off-
putting. The title may be a little garish, but the programs
themselves proved to have the same virtues that good museums try
for. They are entertaining and at the same time educational about
dinosaurs and paleontology.

The title, I should point out, is not entirely accurate. First the
series obviously deals with animals from the entire Mesozoic (the
Dinosaur Age) and beyond, not just the middle Jurassic age. Most
of the animals shown are not from the Jurassic at all.

The concept of the program is simple enough. Some dinosaur fossil
finds show clues that the animals died fighting each other and met
violent deaths. The series confines itself to just those sites.
Real scientists do a paleontological "forensic analysis." (These
fights took place millions of years before there was any law but
the Law of the Jungle, and they still call them "crime scenes."
Talk about cold cases!) The battle, from the evidence found, is
recreated in such detail that most of the program the viewer is
seeing recreated scenes of the battle. Each episode is
meticulously put together giving a scientific analysis of the
fossils. By the way, each episode starts with a tongue-in-cheek
warning that what follows is graphic and that viewer discretion is
advised. Sure, the scenes are graphic, but I doubt anyone is too
concerned about seeing CGI violence. Some of the themes may give
parents a moment's hesitation. They include raptor gang attacks,
cannibalism, huge predators, and more. But the kids probably love
it.

The series is well designed to be a lot of fun to watch, but under
this sugar coating is hiding a lot of information. The viewer
probably finds it too entertaining to mind. Also some of the
information is new since the film JURASSIC PARK was made. (In that
film the boy saves himself from being seen by the Tyrannosaurus Rex
by standing very still. We now know the T-Rex probably had better
eyesight than we do and it would quickly have seen the boy, and
would likely have quickly converted him into fast-food.)

There currently have" been twelve episodes made in the series
"Jurassic Fight Club" and this pack comes with all twelve, plus some
additional lecture footage from paleontologist George Blasing who
also provides explanatory pieces within each episode. Included are
battles with eighteen-million-year-old mega-sharks called Megalodon
and the giant flat-faced bear called Arctodus. This series
constitutes four of the eight disks in this set.

"Prehistoric Mega-Disasters":
Okay, so what is bigger and more powerful than a dinosaur? Well, a
storm is a lot bigger and packs a lot more power. And in Earth's
history our planet has probably been very badly pummeled by both
meteors and meteorology. A modern hurricane can wield pretty
impressive power. But, a hurricane is probably not a mega-
disaster. A "hypercane" is. It is a hurricane up to twenty miles
high. It is big enough that a few of them could destroy the entire
ozone layer. Then you got real problems. Hypercanes are one more
disaster that could have killed off the dinosaurs. The film THE
DAY AFTER TOMORROW was not a great piece of science writing, but it
did convince the thrill-hungry viewing public that there might be
something exciting about a really powerful storm. "Prehistoric
Mega-Disasters" follows somewhat the same formula as "Jurassic
Fight Club". It has really impressive visuals matched to really
impressive scientific explanations. The scary thing is a good
meteor hit could set off a chain of hypercanes. This is all
explained with what is as far as I can judge good scientific
accuracy and some genuine oh-look-at-that sorts of visuals.

A hypercane is just the first of seven mega-disasters covered, each
of which gets its own episode of the Mega-Disasters series.
Actually one episode is designated a "bonus" episode. It is not
clear what that means since it is just one more episode. There are
two disks of the Mega-disaster series.

That leaves two more documentaries, each a little over ninety
minutes in length.

"Clash of the Cave Men":
This film actually goes into some speculative fiction. It goes
back to a time, about 30,000 years ago, when there were two
different competing human races in Europe. They were, of course,
the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons. We are the descendents of
Cro-Magnons and if "Clash of the Cave Men" is to be believed, that
outcome was never in much doubt. We Cro-Magnons rule!
Unfortunately with all the advantages that the Cro-Magnons had it
does not seem like a fair fight, and this is a fairly downbeat
documentary. The poor Neanderthals seem to lose at every turn.
And they are ugly. There is less room here for spectacle.

"Journey to 10,000 BC":
This documentary was clearly made to coincide with Roland
Emmerich's film 10,000 BC. That film was reputedly made with
little interest in scientific accuracy. (I have not seen it, but
the trailer confirms that opinion nicely.) In fact, compared to
10,000 BC's juxtaposing mammoths and pyramids even APOCALYPTO does
not look so bad. This film, like "Clash of the Cave Men", uses CGI
for animals, but it uses it much less sparingly than the first six
disks. We see Ice Age man dealing with mammoths and saber-toothed
tigers. The narrative does have dramatization, but it is done in a
lower-key style than dinosaur and storm programs.

It is less true with the last two entries, but in the earlier
documentaries there is a tendency to foreshadow where the
explanation is going, just before where a commercial break would
come for the television broadcast. After the break there is a
recap of what they were saying before the break. This gives the
documentary makers an opportunity to recycle a lot of their
expensive CGI footage. It also means less they have to film.

But overall, the package is one that should really stoke your sense
of wonder whether you are six years old or sixty. The special
effects are imaginative and for the first two series are probably of
theatrical quality. This is a collection of documentaries that
glory in spectacle. [-mrl]

I actually interviewed Bill Nye years ago. I remember his as a
nice guy, good interview.

The story of people in Texas objecting to hearing that the moon
reflects sunlight as violating the Bible brings several thoughts to
mind:

1. The South is *still* not ready to be readmitted to the United
States.

2. Most religious people (Jews, Catholics, most Protestants) would
be amazed at the stupidity such Biblical literalism leads to. For
must of us, since is NOT in conflict with religion and this example
demonstrates how such literalism distorts and does serious damage
to the text.

3. It's scary that these Texas idiots--there's no other word for
it--have a tremendous impact on what goes into our textbooks
nationwide because the state is one of the largest purchasers of
schoolbooks.

I'm for letting Texas secede, and then putting up an armed guard
along the border to prevent illegal immigrants from sneaking in
and taking the jobs of real Americans. Just imagine what would
have happened if Texas had left before the 2000 election. :-)
[-dk]

Mark replies:

About a month ago "Scientific American" ran a podcast on how much
power the head of the Texas school board had in keeping evolution
out of textbooks across the country and how ignorant his decisions
are. I was aware of the problem, but not how extreme it was.

Tim McDaniel writes, "http://tinyurl.com/dg7ms9 agrees that
several people left a lecture by Bill Nye when he noted that the
Moon is not itself a 'lesser light' of its own, apparently
contradicting the book of Genesis. Just to be precise, it wasn't
'last week': 'This story originally appeared in the Waco
Tribune-Herald on April 6, 2006'. But 2006 is no comfort to those
of us living in Texas." [-tmd]

Evelyn notes, "Mark had already put in the following correction:
'Correction: the incident I referred to I thought was recent, but
it actually happened in 2006.' [-mrl]" [-ecl]

[Yes, I know it's not time yet for my Borges column. But I had
written this already for another purpose, and I'm a bit short of
books I am currently reading to write about because of the Sidewise
and Hugo nominees. I will probably be doing a couple of columns on
the Hugo short fiction, but for now, this column will have to
suffice.]

Recently someone who found my page on magical realism
(
http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper/magreal.htm) mistook me
for an expert on it and asked me for more information. I explained
that I was not an expert on magical realism; if I had an area of
expertise, it was Jorge Luis Borges and he was not (contrary to
some people's comments) a magical realist. She asked why, and I
answered her. Having written that, I figured I might as well put
it here as well.

The short answer:

If magical realism is--as Franz Roh described it--a form in which
"our real world re-emerges before our eyes, bathed in the clarity
of a new day," then I cannot see how this could be applied to
Borges's writings.

The long answer:

Magical realism (to me, anyway) involves the idea that a story is
set in our world, but our world "enhanced" by folklore and magic,
or at least magic in the sense of coincidences, miracles, etc. So
Horacio Quiroga's "Juan Darien" (about a tiger cub that changes
into a boy) might be considered proto-magical realism. But
Borges's stories often seem completely detached from our world
(e.g., "The Library of Babel", "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", or
even "The Babylonian Lottery"). When they are clearly set in this
world, they either have no "magical" element (e.g. "Death and the
Compass" or "Funes the Memorious") or the element is a single
fantastical object (e.g., "The Book of Sand" or "The Zahir"). Of
all his stories, the only one that comes to mind as possibly being
magical realism would be "The Aleph".

Magical realism also seems to imply (again, at least to me) some
interaction between the characters of the story and the "magical"
elements--a recognition and acceptance of that aspect. But many of
Borges' stories don't actually have characters--or plot, come to
that. "The Library of Babel" has neither in any meaningful sense,
nor does "The Babylonian Lottery", nor "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius". "The Book of Sand" has a Bible salesman show up at the
narrator's house with a book of infinite pages, but the two
characters are there only to provide some framework for Borges to
describe the book. And so on.

And finally, I think magical realism requires a minimum length to
present the magical elements, and almost all of Borges's stories
are shorter than this. The longest piece in FICCIONES is "Tlon,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" at 20 pages, followed by "Death and the
Compass" at 14 pages. The *average* length is about 9 pages.

Borges was more influenced by the various movements in Europe (e.g.
surrealism, Dadaism, and so on), although one must ultimately say
he is sui generis. In a list of authors that says, "If you like A,
you'll like B," the entry for Borges would read, "If you like
Borges, you'll just have to look for more Borges."

(The latter is not entirely true. There are a few Borgesian
pastiches around, such as Luis Verissimo's BORGES AND THE
ORANGUTANS or Rhys Hughes's A NEW UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY, but
these are individual works, written specifically to imitate Borges.
There is no author whose overall writing style can be said to be
similar to Borges.) [-ecl]

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
Paradoxical as it sounds, many intellectuals
prefer life in the mud to life in clear water.
-- Martin H. Fischer